What's up with TV finales?

By Jeannette McMahon (online producer )

The highly anticipated final episode of Breaking Bad seems to have achieved the almost impossible. Tied up loose ends, satisfied the fans, given the characters a suitable send-off and tugged at the heartstrings.

It's earned a place among only a handful of much-adored TV shows that have managed to handle their farewell with grace and flair.

Others have stumbled at the final hurdle, blotting their copybook with awkward, ambiguous or anticlimactic finales that viewers are still bagging years or even decades later.

The gold standard for TV finales is still M.A.S.H, and not just because it was watched by an astonishing 125million people in the US, a figure that is never likely to be equalled given today's vastly changed viewing environment.

At the time, the program set in a mobile army hospital during the Korean War wasn't just a popular show, it was a cultural phenomenon that was almost compulsory viewing and lasted eight years longer than the war itself.

The death of one of its main characters felt like a personal loss to millions of people. So that final episode had an awful lot of expectations to live up to.

And Goodbye, Farewell and Amen delivered. With its trademark mix of humour and darkness, the war was declared over and a damaged Hawkeye flew off in a helicopter to see rocks arranged on the ground spelling out "Goodbye".

Another show that crafted an almost perfect ending was Cheers.

Perennial pants-man, barman Sam Malone, had the opportunity to leave with his true love, Diane, but chose to stay with his even greater love, the Boston bar in which the show was set.

The final scene has Sam alone in the darkened bar, realising how lucky he is, and telling a hopeful customer at the door "Sorry, we're closed".

The Mary Tyler Moore show finale is remembered for its iconic scene where the characters, huddling together in tears after they're all sacked (except for dimwit Ted), shuffle towards a tissue box as a group.

It's the much-loved Mary who takes a last look and turns out the newsroom lights.

For a show about funerals and death, Six Feet Under chose an ideal way to wrap the series when it showed flash-forwards of all the characters' lives and their ultimate deaths. What could have been depressing was instead poignant and beautiful.

A powerhouse, confronting series like The Shield was always going to have an uncompromising end.

But anti-hero and corrupt detective Vic Mackey doesn't go out in a hail of bullets.

Instead he loses everything and everyone he cares about, including the power he craved, and winds up humiliated and alone.

Probably the most controversial series finale was the closing scene of The Sopranos.

After its groundbreaking run changed the nature of television drama, the story of Tony Soprano and his two families was expected to have a big, dramatic, and probably violent ending.

Instead, we just had Tony sitting down to dinner in a restaurant with his wife and son as his daughter, Meadow, parks her car outside.

The tension builds, and as the jukebox plays Don't Stop Believin' Tony looks up just as the screen goes black.

Did he get whacked, or did the Soprano family continue enjoying their meal? The writers have never cleared up the mystery and the debate continues years later.

Another series finale that left more questions than answers was Lost.

After seasons of mystery piled on mystery and complex riddles within conspiracies, many loose ends were left hanging as the characters went "into the light".

Other finales were so obviously bad there was no need for debate.

The last episode of Seinfeld has been widely panned as one of the lamest series endings ever.

After nine years of brilliantly crafted half-hour episodes where all the threads were craftily tied together, instead we saw a bloated trainwreck where the four main characters are put on trial for "criminal indifference" and made to answer for their many transgressions.

Past characters are paraded through, Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer get sent off to jail, and the last scene has Jerry delivering a stand-up routine to his fellow prisoners that falls horribly flat, just like the episode itself.

Its biggest crime was that it wasn't even funny, and its one redeeming feature was the use of Green Day's melancholy farewell song, Good Riddance.

More recently, serial-killer drama Dexter went out with a whimper rather than a bang, with the lead character hiding out in the woods after taking his sister off life support and faking his own death at sea.

No big confrontation with the police, no gruesome death at the hands of another serial killer, no despairing suicide...

The writers say the network had forbidden them to kill Dexter off so presumably their options were limited, but at least they've left the way open for a telemovie giving this serial killer of serial killers a more suitable send-off.

Wrapping up a brilliant series in a satisfying way is a tricky balancing act that even the most clever writers and directors struggle to pull off.

Hmmm, I wonder what they'll do with Mad Men's Don Draper when his time comes?

In the "What's Up?" segment each Friday at 3pm on 1233 ABC Newcastle, Jeannette McMahon discusses aspects of popular culture, including music, film, television and fashion. You can also listen via live streaming at our website, abc.net.au/newcastle.